TBH: You say in your new book Why We Believe What We Believe that it is the nature of our brain to search for its deepest truth. So where is self in this picture? Is self merely a construct in the brain?

ANDY: There’s a couple of very interesting answers for that question. I mean on one hand if we start from a neuro psychological perspective then the concept of the self and how we develop our beliefs, we’re sort of always trapped with the part of the conclusions we’ve come to…we’re trapped within our brain really. So how we perceive of ourselves as well as the rest of the world is all based on what comes into our senses - what we think about, how our brain processes information.

Of course, part of how we develop a sense of self is that our “self” is what really has all of those senses. So we feel ourselves more than we feel somebody else. It’s not to say that we can’t feel somebody else’s pain and so forth. But clearly there’s a difference in terms of how we experience our own self verses anything else that’s out there. So on one hand the brain is sort of set up to conceive of our self as being separate from the world. But on another hand our brain is very capable of expanding that self to connect that self with the rest of the world.

In a lot of our studies of meditation, for example, people actually describe that they get beyond that sense of self. That they feel as if their self has been connected or become one with something much greater than that self. And so in some senses we are kind of built to have a sense of our self and to establish that self, and that constrains how we understand the world. There’s also this interesting aspect of how we get beyond that, especially through various practices like meditation and prayer and so forth. That enables at least the perception of that self getting beyond itself to see the world in a very different kind of way. And in many ways to have a more universal sense of self instead of a more specific kind of ego sense of self. So does that answer your question?

TBH: Actually it seems there is no real answer.

ANDY: That’s true.

TBH: Your book makes that clear. And yet it’s fascinating because on the other hand at one point you speak about a current hypothesis that says the human brain is also inclined to accept reality as a spiritual belief separate from the influence of others and even physical “sense reality.”

ANDY: Right. The thing that we kept coming back to in terms of the process of beliefs, and this also ties back to being, in some instances, basically trapped within the brain, is whatever information, or whatever ideas we form about ourselves and about the world are, in fact, beliefs. And whether they are spiritual beliefs or social beliefs or political beliefs, whatever, they’re based on the fact that we have processed that information. So we’re always dealing with what might be argued to be a best guess about our world. And to the extent that until we really have complete knowledge of what that world is really about, I think that there are certain limitations and restrictions that we have based on just the inherent workings of our mind. And what I’ve been trying to do in our research is to try to see if there are ways of getting past that in some way, and to get through these practices like meditation or prayer - to get to something which enables us to get beyond that merely subjective and objective sense of the world, and get to some deeper reality, a deeper understanding of reality.

TBH: Or what you could call a ‘direct experience’.

ANDY: Yes. But I want to point out this really goes extremely well with What the Bleep and with the whole concept of creating our own realities and so forth. In addition to what was discussed in terms of the quantum level and all the other perspectives of reality, this is what this research is ultimately demonstrating on a neurological level. On a very neuro-psychological level, what we believe about our world - which ultimately makes up our reality - really depends upon how our beliefs are formed in the brain.

TBH: What’s fascinating is what makes us chose to go beyond your belief system when we’re trained and educated from the get-go to form concrete beliefs that define self? What is the trigger that makes us chose to lay waste to our self concepts - like the phoenix burning its own nest - to search for something else?

ANDY: I think that it’s one of the fundamental problems that we all have as human beings: that we are, in some senses, forced to conceive of very concrete belief systems. And part of that goes back to how the brain works. Because if you think about how the neurons in the brain work, the more connections that are used, the stronger those connections become, the stronger your beliefs become. So that’s why if your belief system is in, say, Christianity - then you read the bible, you pray to Jesus Christ, you think about Christianity, and that becomes your reality because the neurons that are firing that underlay all those ideas and experiences become stronger and stronger the more you focus on it. And that becomes your reality.

Now how, or why, do you go beyond that? Usually what happens is that there is some crisis or some issue that arises where a person realizes the limitation in their belief system, or that there is something that’s not working for them. And it could be an emotion not working for them – maybe they have a depression or anxiety about the world. Or it could be that their ways of meeting people, or dating, or political beliefs, or whatever, are not working for them. And then the question is, can you get out of that?

Again I think What the Bleep really targeted this idea that a lot of times we get so stuck within our belief systems even when they’re not working. And it becomes difficult to recognize the negative, destructive nature of beliefs that we hold. But when we do ultimately find them, sometimes we can come to the decision that this is just not working and we need to find a new way. This can be experientially driven. It could be an insight that comes to them. Or it could be through a long, methodical process that they ultimately try to rearrange those connections in the brain and try to rewire their brain and rewire their beliefs.

TBH: From your experience and research, what is it that is actually happening when someone has a “mystical experience.” Let’s say it’s someone who’s atheistic, or pragmatic and very down to earth. And all of a sudden they have this direct experience, altogether out of the belief system box, that transcends their sense of self. How do you explain that?

ANDY: Well this is actually the heart of the research I’ve been doing over the last decade or so. One of the critical areas that I think is involved is this area called the parietal lobe that normally takes our sensory information and tries to create for us a sense of ourself. And if the sensory information that is normally streaming in to give us our sense of self goes away, which can be either on purpose through the practice of meditation, or spontaneous like a near death experience, or what have you - then you no longer conceive of your self in the same way. Instead of having a very deep sense of everything is separate from you, you have this deep sense that you are intimately interconnected with everything. And when that happens, that can create a very strong change in how your perception of the world continues from that point forward. That particular moment actually rearranges the neural connections.

One of the things we have realized in our research is that emotions are very important for belief. The stronger the emotional response, the more powerful the memory and the more powerful the belief that will come from it. That’s why if you’re stressed about studying for a test, you’ll remember those facts more than you will sometime later when you no longer have that stress. So when you have a mystical experience, the incredible power of the emotional responses that you get from it drives those experiences very deeply into your memory so that you perceive that experience as being one of the most vivid, one of the most clearly remembered experiences that you’ve ever had. And whatever insights you take from that you carry on with you.

Most people who have had mystical experiences will describe that they carry with them a sense of their profound reality pretty much until the day they die. The amazing thing about those experiences is, not only do they feel incredibly real when people are having those experiences, but the memory of them continues to make them feel incredibly real - even more so than their everyday reality experience. Which is remarkable.

As far as we can tell, the limbic system of the brain that helps to control our emotions and which also helps to “write” our memories into our brains is also activated during these states.

Some of the early work that I did looking at meditation shows that a part of the frontal lobe is turned on when we are focusing our attention. So when our attention is on meditation or prayer, it’s activated and we show that in our brain scans. But what we’ve always hypothesized and now are starting to see some evidence for, is that when people have very, very strong experiences where not only does the spatial sense of self and other go away, which is that orientation part of the brain, but the sense of the self as in control goes away. It’s almost as if the self is overcome by the experience itself and what we think happens in those cases is the frontal lobe, instead of being turned on, shuts down.

In our studies of speaking in tongues, for example, which is a very strong spiritual state, subjects say they don’t feel like they’re in charge of that process. And our studies are showing that the frontal lobe is shut down during that state. We’ve never captured that with meditation because the person is always in the active “act” of meditation. But I suspect that if we actually captured somebody when they literally just completely lost it and hit some kind of true, peak state that the frontal lobe activity would go back down again. So I think that that’s a very important area.

The last area that’s probably worth mentioning is an area called the thalamus. This is a very key relay in the brain and it helps all the different structures talk to each other. And the thalamus is also a very critical sensory relay as well. This is the one area where we have found differences between long-term meditators and non-meditators. We think that part of how a person’s perceptions of the world are changed may ultimately be through the thalamus. How the thalamus works to help us establish our sense of the world and our perceptions of the world may also be dramatically altered through these kinds of transformational experiences.

TBH: Fascinating. I’ve meditated for 20 years and have been extremely fortunate to be able to access that state where there’s no self meditating anymore. And that is the most profoundly real state I’ve ever experienced. Yet there’s no “I” at that point that’s having any experience whatsoever. It’s just…

ANDY: It’s just there.

TBH: It’s just there.

ANDY: That’s what fascinates me, partially because of my own similar types of experiences as you just described. But a goal of my whole career up till this point is to seek out an integration of science and religion, or science and spirituality. And the reason that I think that that is so critical is that science ultimately is forever locked within our own observation of the world. We’re stuck in our own sense of self and we can’t escape that to see the world from some kind of outside perspective. And so the question is, how do you get beyond the human brain?

Well, that experience that you just described is the only place that I know of, or the only description that I know of, where such a state is at least described to exist. You know … whether it does or not, you know obviously that could be open to debate depending on everybody’s belief and perspective?

TBH: I guess if you’re a scientist you could just say, “Well, I’m sorry, the whole brain shut down at that point and that’s what you were really experiencing.”

ANDY: Right. What fascinates me are two things about that state. One is that it tells you that it goes beyond the brain; it goes beyond the self. And that’s the only place that I know of where that description exists. So it’s the only type of state that I think can get us beyond the limitations of science. That doesn’t mean that we throw away the science. But we have to figure out a way to join those two up; to figure out what that state is.

And the other thing that also fascinates me, which you mentioned about it, is this sense of realness. I used to talk a lot about states of reality with my late colleague, Eugene d’Aquili . Say you’re in a dream. It feels really real. You wake up and you say, “Well, it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. This is reality.” The state that you’re describing has the same relationship with everyday reality. Science and our brain exist in everyday reality … but here you - and others - are saying in essence, “But that’s inferior.” I mean, I hate to use that word. But, it’s a lesser sense of reality. So to me, that just turns the tables on all of what science has to say. And again, I don’t mean to sound like I think science is invalidated…

TBH: No, not at all.

ANDY: Science is still incredibly crucial to this whole discussion. But it doesn’t get you all the way there. And I think that the spiritual states that we’re talking about, they don’t get you all the way there either - at least in terms of answering all the questions. But I think they may help us get all the way there, at least in terms of this ultimate state of reality - that if we then bring the science back in, we can understand how that relates to that everyday sense of reality. And that’s really what I’ve been striving for all along in my research; trying to answer and address those kinds of questions.

TBH: It’s like trying to map out two totally different - and here I’ll use the term “dimensions” loosely. In our “real” everyday world, if our neuro processes naturally create opposites - as you’ve pointed out, it’s easier to quantify objects in pairs and differentiate them and that’s kind of like the baseline function of the brain - then we personally operate from that dynamic of opposition and polarity. And science and everything in society operate from that place too. And yet we’re talking about trying to examine and explain a non polarized unity state that doesn’t even exist in “normal” reality.

ANDY: Right. But I think what’s fascinating about the brain is that it can operate in both of those modes. It has this binary perspective, and it also has a holistic, “airy-fairy” perspective. And it’s a question of which one do we key into? And, in fact, it actually goes back to your earlier question about how do we make these big changes in the brain?

Because to me, from a neuro-physiological perspective, the brain itself can’t just suddenly lay down new neural connections. So when somebody has a transformative experience - and this is a hypothesis - but to me what I think is happening is that those connections were always there. It’s just a matter of can we access them? So if you have sort of side-by-side binary reductionist perspective and a holistic perspective, so the moment you’re tapped into just one, then that’s what you get and you don’t get the other. Until you get that transformative moment.

I think the large reason that I wrote Biology of Belief was to help everyone understand the belief systems that they hold, and where they may have their limitations. I hope it helps people to explore what their beliefs are about and understand the limitations of those beliefs. I hate to sound so optimistically idealistic, but I really hope that people kind of realize that we’re all kind of in the same boat. We’re all trapped within our brain. We’re all trying to understand our world, and we all develop our belief systems to help us deal with the world.

But the fact that I develop one belief system and someone develops another one doesn’t mean I need to out-of-hand reject that other system. That belief system works for that person. Maybe what we need is to find a greater common ground and a deeper sense of compassion for everybody, because we’re all trying to do the best that we can.

And again part of the problem is that our brain is set up to defend our belief systems because we need them. They work for us, and that’s why you get so much animosity sometimes between Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Muslims, and Jews and Palestinians. A lot of the reason that we have the violence and the antagonism is because we have our beliefs and we hold them dearly. And on one hand we have to. But on the other hand I think that there’s a newer level, another level I guess, that we can get to that will help us to understand ourselves better and help us understand everyone else better.